Emoji
Emojis are ideograms and smileys used in electronic messages and web pages. Emojis are used much like emoticons and exist in various genres, including facial expressions, common objects, places and types of weather, and animals. Originating on Japanese mobile phones in the late 1990s, emojis have become increasingly popular worldwide since their international inclusion in Apple's iPhones, which was followed by similar adoption by Android and other mobile operating systems. Apple's macOS operating system supports emoji as of version 10.7. Microsoft added monochrome Unicode emoji coverage to the Segoe UI Symbol system font in Windows 8 and added color emoji in Windows 8.1 via the Segoe UI Emoji font. The first international Emojicon conference was held in San Francisco, California on November 4, 2016. Originally meaning pictograph, the word emoji comes from Japanese e (絵, "picture") + moji (文字, "character"). The resemblance to the English words emotion and emoticon is purely coincidental. History The development of emojis was predated by text-based emoticons, as well as graphical representations, inside and outside of Japan. Emojis were initially used by Japanese mobile operators, NTT DoCoMo, au, and SoftBank Mobile (formerly Vodafone). These companies each defined their own variants of emojis using proprietary standards. The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 in Japan by Shigetaka Kurita. He was part of the team working on NTT DoCoMo's i-mode mobile Internet platform. Kurita took inspiration from weather forecasts that used symbols to show weather, Chinese characters and street signs, and from manga that used stock symbols to express emotions, such as lightbulbs signifying inspiration. The first set of 176 12×12 pixel emoji was created as part of i-mode's messaging features to help facilitate electronic communication, and to serve as a distinguishing feature from other services. Kurita created the first 180 emoji based on the expressions that he observed people making and other things in the city. For NTT DoCoMo's i-mode, each emoji is drawn on a 12×12 pixel grid. When transmitted, emoji symbols are specified as a two-byte sequence, in the private-use range E63E through E757 in the Unicode character space, or F89F through F9FC for Shift JIS. The basic specification has 1706 symbols, with 76 more added in phones that support C-HTML 4.0. Emoji pictograms by Japanese mobile phone brand au are specified using the IMG tag. SoftBank Mobile emojis are wrapped between SI/SO escape sequences, and support colours and animation. DoCoMo's emoji are the most compact to transmit while au's version is more flexible and based on open standards. From 2010 onwards, some emoji character sets have been incorporated into Unicode, a standard system for indexing characters, which has allowed them to be used outside Japan and to be standardized across different operating systems. Hundreds of emoji characters were encoded in the Unicode Standard in version 6.0 released in October 2010 (and in the related international standard ISO/IEC 10646). The additions, originally requested by Google (Kat Momoi, Mark Davis, and Markus Scherer wrote the first draft for consideration by the Unicode Technical Committee in August 2007) and Apple Inc. (whose Yasuo Kida and Peter Edberg joined the first official UTC proposal for 607 characters as coauthors in January 2009), went through a long series of commenting by members of the Unicode Consortium and national standardization bodies of various countries participating in ISO/IEC JTC1/SC2/WG2, especially the United States, Germany, Ireland (led by Michael Everson), and Japan; various new characters (especially symbols for maps and European signs) were added during the consensus-building process. Encoding in the Unicode standard has allowed emojis to become popular outside Japan. The core emojis set in Unicode 6.0 consisted of 722 characters, of which 114 characters map to sequences of one or more characters in the pre-6.0 Unicode standard, and the remaining 608 characters map to sequences of one or more characters introduced in Unicode 6.0. There is no block specifically set aside for emoji – the new symbols were encoded in seven different blocks (some newly created), and there exists a Unicode data file called EmojiSources.txt that includes mappings to and from the Japanese vendors' legacy character sets. "Regional Indicator Symbols" were defined as part of this set of characters as an alternative to encoding separate characters for national flags. The popularity of emojis has caused pressure from vendors and international markets to add additional designs into the Unicode standard to meet the demands of different cultures. Unicode 7.0 added approximately 250 emoji, many from the Webdings and Wingdings fonts. Some characters now defined as emoji are inherited from a variety of pre-Unicode messenger systems not only used in Japan, including Yahoo and MSN Messenger. Unicode 8.0 added another 41 emoji, including articles of sports equipment such as the cricket bat, food items such as the taco, signs of the Zodiac, new facial expressions, and symbols for places of worship.18 Emoji characters vary slightly between platforms within the limits in meaning defined by the Unicode specification, as companies have tried to provide artistic presentations of ideas and objects. For example, following an Apple tradition, the calendar emoji on Apple products always shows July 17, the date in 2002 Apple announced its iCal calendar application for Mac. This led some Apple product users to initially nickname July 17 "International Emoji Calendar Day", which is now more commonly referred to as World Emoji Day. Other emoji fonts show different dates or do not show a specific one. Some Apple emojis are very similar to the SoftBank standard, since SoftBank was the first Japanese network the iPhone launched on. For example, �� (defined by Unicode as "dancer – also used for 'let's party'") is female on Apple and SoftBank standards but male or gender-neutral on others. Journalists have noted that the ambiguity of emojis has allowed them to take on culture-specific meanings not present in the original glyphs. For example, �� (nail polish) has been described as being used in English-language communities to signify "non-caring fabulousness" and "anything from shutting haters down to a sense of accomplishment". Unicode manuals sometimes provide notes on auxiliary meanings of an object to guide designers on how emoji may be used, for example noting that some users may expect �� (seat) to stand for "a reserved or ticketed seat, as for an airplane, train, or theatre". Communication Problems Research has shown that emojis are often misunderstood. In some cases, this is related to how the actual emoji design is interpreted by the viewer, in other cases the emoji that was sent, was not shown in the same way at the receiving side The difference between these two problems is, that the first relates to the cultural or contextual interpretation of the smiley. When the author picks a smiley, the author thinks about the smiley in a certain way, but the same smiley may not trigger the same thoughts with the receiver. The second problem is technological. When an author of a message picks a smiley from a list of smiley faces, this smiley is encoded in some way during the transmission, and if the author and the reader do not use the same software or operating system for their devices, the reader's device may visualize the same smiley in a different way. Small changes to a smiley's look may completely alter its perceived meaning with the receiver. The third problem is structural. Emojis have no sentence structure yet, such as grammar. Thus when used in communication, the same emoji sentence can be interpreted differently between different people. Emojigraphy is a form of structural grammar in Emoji as a Language. Although the implementation of grammar is still in infancy stage, its the first step to make Emoji Language a more reliable way of communication. Pop Culture *Sony Pictures Animation developed an animated film, titled The Emoji Movie, centered around emojis with Anthony Leondis directing and co-writing with Eric Siegel and Michelle Raimo Kouyate producing. *A musical called Emojiland premiered at Rockwell Table & Stage in Los Angeles in May 2016 after presenting selected songs at the same venue in 2015. *The Doctor Who episode "Smile" features robots that communicate via Emoji Language named Emojibots. *In the first episode of the fifth season of Samurai Jack, there are alien characters that communicate in Emoji Langauge.